Throughout his lifetime, Brahms accompanied dozens of singers in a variety of settings, ranging from huge public halls to his friends’ homes, and conducted many others in choirs. Some of those working relationships were one-offs, arising from the widespread practice of including a set of piano-accompanied songs within most concerts and the expediency and cost-effectiveness of using local talent. Others were deep, enduring partnerships; the timbres and interpretative approaches of those singers are surely ingrained in his vocal music. Overall, Brahms’s singers were generally not part of the international operatic elite associated with Verdi, Bizet and Massenet. Figures like Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) and Raimund von Zur-Mühlen (1854–1931)were almost exclusively concert singers and, later on, teachers. Most hailed from German-speaking territories, reflecting Brahms’s own concert career.

Since Brahms only had a salaried position for brief periods (as choral director in Detmold, 1857–9, director of the Vienna Singakademie 1863–4 and artistic director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde 1871–5), he had to support himself primarily by other means. Apart from concert fees, he relied on the honoraria his publishers paid him and did not receive royalties. Indeed, his relationships with his publishers are a means of tracing his stratospheric career trajectory. As a young man, Brahms was forced to tout his works to publishers and enter into protracted and wearying negotiations, which jarred against his artistic principles. In later years, he was a universally courted composer who could determine the conditions under which his work would be published. In fact, after 1869, it was virtually only one publisher, Fritz Simrock, who issued all of Brahms’s new works.